Tag: history

mill:liminal by murmer

Into the mill. Mill:liminal is the audio accompaniment to the 2018 film The Mill, recorded at the Räpina Paper Factory in Estonia.

MILL:LIMINAL IS NOT AN EASY RECORD to peg, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting or enjoyable. In fact, it’s among the more haunting, thought-provoking, and meditative recordings I have heard in some time. Released this year by Murmer, the handle of sound artist Patrick Tubin McGinley, it is the sonic accompaniment to a 35-minute film made with Daniel Edward Allen in 2018 called The Mill. To record The Mill, McGinley and Allen descended on the Räpina Paberivabrik, a paper mill in southeast Estonia that has been producing paper continuously since the 1730s. Here, the old mill’s creaks, whirs, rattles and hums are arranged into drone-like compositions distilled into seven, hypnotic tracks. McGinley reports that he was inspired to record the mill after having been a customer. Räpina produced the packaging for earlier releases, and he was drawn in by its mesmeric sounds.

McGinley’s approach to recording is very cinema verite. His sound recorders are the shaky hand holding the camera, giving you a first-person look — or in this case, listen — at what’s happening. The sounds for mill:liminal were recorded mostly with a Sennheisier MKH 30/40 boomed microphone rig connected to an SD744T hard disc portable field recorder. Additional sounds were recorded with self-constructed contact microphones and some with DPA 4060 miniature omnidirectional microphones. So what can sound like sound captured raw is actually the product of some serious technological sophistication and deep processing. 

The result is unsettling, for mill:liminal sounds like consciousness melting off the slate of time. In some moments, the low and steady growl of the paper mill machinery takes on monastic tones, as if a monastery of Tibetan monks were assembled for prayer in the mountains.

It’s not hard to find parallels in McGinley’s work, but it does lead one to unexpected places. Is a man in a plaid shirt with a microphone in hand, poised to capture sounds in the field, not unlike Alan Lomax, with his field recordings of world music? McGinley does agree with that.

“I have long-standing thoughts about the world of field recording and experimental music being considered as folk music,” he says. “It’s music that has grown out of a community outside of academic circles, a sort of voice of a population.” Interestingly, he has noted that the mill, in its own way, is a living entity, as people play limited roles in maintaining its processes. 

There are also sonic links to the experiments of minimalist composer La Monte Young and his Dream Syndicate. One can see how the hum of a paper mill aligns with Young’s tunings that matched the environmental sounds around him, most famously his reliance on a refrigerator’s 60-cycle electrical hum, which he considered as a foundational drone for his music. Young called the 60-cycle hum the “drone of Western civilization,” but as mill:liminal reminds us, these folk songs of machinery are all around us. If listened to, they can be a thing of beauty.

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mill:liminal is available now as a digital download and will be available soon as a cd packaged in paper from the Räpina Paberivabrik. In addition to undertaking field recordings of creepy paper mills, Murmer also produces a regular weekly radio show called Framework Radio. Other recordings are available on Bandcamp.

nineteen sixty-eight

WHERE WERE WE? I wondered. Then one of a pack of school boys turned my way and said, “Don’t you know, you’re in 1968!” Is that why everything was so weirdly sepia-toned, as if we had all stepped out of one of those ancient, musty smelling album covers, like Waiting for the Sun by The Doors, or Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. by The Monkees? A strange place was 1968, one foot in the past, one in the future. People’s hair was merely growing then, but had not yet achieved its 1970s freak-flag length. Wide collars, floppy hats. What was I even doing in this murky picture of the past? I was standing outside a school on a street. The boys from 1968 turned and went one way, and I went the other. A girl in a plaid dress passed me by.

It was autumn in 1968, a rainy autumn, or was it a rainy spring? It was cool, moist, there were wet leaves on the mottled asphalt of the street. I walked and walked and soon I was in my old neighborhood on Long Island, which wouldn’t be built for another 17 years or so, but here it was, and the houses were all finished. Jocko and his family were outside their home, which was across the street from my old house, and the sun had just come out. We used to play right over there, in the sand dunes between his house and the neighbors’, and wrestle in the mud. One time he even sprayed us with his sister’s tropical perfume, which made the hornets and the bees of the neighborhood go wild with lust. This time, he was kneeling before a stack of roofing tiles while his brothers did the hard work. I put my hand on his shoulder. “Are you doing okay, man?” I said. Jocko looked up at me, good-natured Sicilian that he was, and said, “Yeah, of course. Just this renovation job is taking forever.” It was. The façade was missing. I could see his room up on the second floor, the wind gusting through. “Where do you sleep at night?” I asked Jocko. “We have to sleep here,” he sighed. “But it sure does get cold at night.”

In the back of the house, I found stacks of utility uniforms, the kinds that construction workers wear. These piles formed elaborate patterns, so that it almost looked like they were a deck of playing cards. I was baffled by the uniforms and knew not what to make of the find.

From there, I walked on.

Eventually, I wound up back at the school where I started. It was a brick building, like all of the school buildings in the district, which had been, per chance, constructed in 1968. I stood there waiting outside of the school while other parents waited for their children. Just then, my friend El Scorcho, a Latin folk singer with a faint moustache I knew from Estonia, arrived. He came down the hill on his bicycle to the sounds of Simon and Garfunkel. He too was here in 1968, and his clothing was of the modern fashion. He wore a brown leather jacket, his black hair was becoming unruly, and he smelled of incense and marijuana. As soon as he saw me, he slowed his peddling and came to a stop. “Oh, you’re here too. You’re in 1968 too,” he said. “What are we doing in 1968?” I asked him. “Beats me,” he said. “I’ve been stuck in 1968 all week. But do you want to get some tacos? I found a place that’s good. Jim Morrison even goes there.”